Extremely generalized, but here's my viewpoint: If startups are a risky venture, video games are insane, and video game startups essentially doomed to failure.

Extremely generalized, but here's my viewpoint: If startups are a risky venture, video games are insane, and video game startups essentially doomed to failure. Your window for sales is the first few months after release. After that they generally slow to a trickle. Microtransactions get brought in to rectify that situation, but then further increase the risk that players will reject your game en masse. Spending time to make a beautiful architecture doesn't make sense. Companies that sell game engines have an incentive to do things right, but spend too long and you'll lag behind the competition in shiny features and your customers will jump ship to things that help them sell games. Key to game development is to iterate fast and fail fast. Building up a prototype and getting it to a state where it's "fun" is crucial, and then the sunk costs fallacy kicks in and the prototype gets cleaned up and shipped. Players are unconcerned with bugs despite often complaining about them. The success of early access games like Minecraft, Day Z, and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds despite often gamebreaking bugs proves this. The disconnect between quality and success has become so pronounced that an entire subgenre of "simulators" has popped up where the core gameplay mechanic is the game being buggy and/or frustrating to play. Goat Simulator, Surgeon Simulator, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, and Hand Simulator come to mind here, but there are plenty more.